Accessibility

To ensure our website is accessible and usable by everyone regardless of technology or ability, it conforms to W3C standards for HTML and CSS in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018. We monitor the website to maintain accessibility, but if you do find any problems please let us know.

Reporting accessibility problems

We have worked hard to achieve full accessibility for this website, but realise there are some areas that still need improving. We are always looking to improve accessibility, however despite our best efforts there may be some limitations. If you would like any of our work in a more accessible format, or find we're not meeting the requirements of the accessibility regulations, then please contact us with details to let us know and help us improve. We will consider your request and aim to respond within five working days.

Plain English

We've made the website text as simple as possible to understand, using plain English wherever possible. Some of our content is technical, and contains scientific or specialist terms and language. In some instances we have not been able to simplify the wording without changing the meaning of the text.

Web technology

The vast majority of our website works correctly on any web technology. For security reasons, we only support TLS 1.2 and higher security protocols, and this means that some older browsers will not display the site. We test for and support Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Apple Safari. Internet Explorer is no longer supported by Microsoft, and while the site may work in more recent versions of IE, we do not recommend its use. You may experience unexpected behaviour in other browsers, although we use fully validated code which should work on any other browser. If you have a problem accessing any documents then AbilityNet has advice to help you make your device easier to use.

PDFs and other documents

If PDFs are not tagged properly they may be difficult to use for those using assistive technologies, so we add accessibility tags to PDFs and strive to make all documents as accessible as possible. New PDFs we publish will meet accessibility standards. However, some of our older PDFs have not been designed for accessibility – for example, they may not be structured so they’re accessible to a screen reader. Our reports and publications present complex information and data via graphs, diagrams and tables as well as text, and it is not feasible or economically viable for us to reformat older PDFs, and additionally accessibility regulations do not require us to amend PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018, if they’re not essential to providing our services or if they represent a disproportionate burden to achieve. Please let us know if you have difficulty accessing PDFs on our site and we will respond and try to help.

Links

We are aware of the following issues with links on our site:

• Some links on the site are not currently formatted in a compliant manner and we aim to fix these as soon as possible.
• Older PDF files may contain broken links which do not resolve. Please note we do not intend to resolve these as this will be a disproportionate burden.

Enforcement procedure

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is responsible for enforcing the accessibility regulations. If you’re not happy with how we respond to your complaint, please contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).